Filename2Caption for Picasa Web Albums0.23.1-signedNo Restart

For your existing Picasa Web Albums, semi-automatically fill in the captions with the file names of your photos. Despite being semi-automatic, it's 10-fold+ faster than doing it manually for most people.

About this Add-on

Anyone who uploaded a bunch of photos to Picasa Web Albums knows how annoying it is that they do not automatically fill in captions using the photos' file names! In fact, it was a highly requested feature for at least 2 years and nothing happened.

If you haven't uploaded your photos yet, I recommend you use some free software to batch add filenames as captions to the EXIF info of your photos. It's faster and not difficult to learn. But if you would like to add captions faster to your existing albums, this addon could help.

This addon helps out by semi-automatically fill in the caption with file names. It's only "semi-automatic", because you would need to do some work too. This is because Google has some tricky Javascript/tokens on their page and makes it hard to fully automate it. Sorry, I tried, but this is the best I could do right now.

Here's how to do it:

In Picasa Web Albums, choose your album->actions->captions.

In Edit Captions screen, enter '1' in each caption box you would like this addon to fill in a filename for you. A fast way of doing this is to fill in a '1' then press 'tab' key, which will bring you to the next caption box, and so on...

Right click and choose 'Filename2caption Now' to automatically fill the filenames into the caption boxes marked with '1'.

Finally you need to click inside the caption boxes that have new names one by one to finalize the renaming. For the last caption box, after you click inside the box, you need to click outside the box once too. Again the fast way would be simply click inside the first box, then use 'tab' key to tab through all boxes and tab out of the last box too.

It sounds like a lot of effort, but it is rather fast when you use the 'tab' key method. Without the addon it'd easily take 10-30 mins to manually rename 50 photos using their filenames, but it takes only a minute or so to rename 50 photos using this addon.

Again I know it's not ideal but it's the best I could do for now. I made it for myself, but hope it could help some of the Firefox users too!